Before Mohamed Fahmy can take up his position as journalist in residence at UBC, he must await the verdict of his terrorism trial that will end next Thursday.
Fahmy is a Canadian journalist and author; much of his work covers unrest in the Middle East. In 2011, Fahmy was reporting on the Egyptian revolution on the ground.
“I have been in Egypt since the first day of the revolution in 2011. I worked mostly for CNN, and then around the time when the protests started against the Muslim Brotherhood.… I quit CNN and I was a private citizen,” said Fahmy. “I took my journalism cap off and I was, ironically, I was protesting against the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Fahmy points to the irony of his political stance because on December 29 2013, less than a week after the Muslim Brotherhood were declared terrorists, Fahmy and his colleagues were arrested at the Cairo Marriott Hotel on charges of conspiring with and being a member of the Brotherhood.
After quitting CNN, Fahmy became bureau chief of news network Al-Jazeera English. The accusations that sparked Fahmy’s arrest include, while being bureau chief, operating without a proper license and fabricating news to falsely portray Egypt in a state of civil war to serve the Muslim Brotherhood.
Fahmy and his colleagues were initially sentenced to seven years in prison. However, the ruling was eventually overturned in January 2015.
“My colleague, Australian colleague, was deported and me and my other colleague were put through a retrial,” said Fahmy.
Before this sentence came out, Fahmy spent a month in solitary confinement.
Fahmy says his trial was politicized and is mainly a product of Egypt’s desire to punish Qatar for “supporting the Muslim Brotherhood politically and financially during their one-year tenure in ruling Egypt.”
“As bureau chief I am 100 per cent sure that our reports were flawless, never fabricated, totally balanced and did not favour any group … and obviously the accusations that we were members of the Muslim Brotherhood are, you know, ridiculous,” said Fahmy, when asked how he responds to the accusations against him.
According to Fahmy, in this round of trial Fahmy and his colleagues are trying to convince the judge that the judge has separate responsibilities in terms of trying the journalists versus trying the network itself.
“If there are, you know, issues with the licenses as the prosecutor has presented to the court then, this is the responsibility of the network, not us.”
Fahmy is currently suing the Al-Jazeera network for $100 million over alleged negligence that led to Fahmy’s arrest and imprisonment. The suit has yet to reach an outcome.
When asked what he expects the sentence to be next week, Fahmy said that “I think the judge pretty much understands as well that we were not conspiring with the Muslim brotherhood. However, we are, me and my family, very worried knowing that the outcome of this trial will not only depend on evidence."
According to Fahmy, Qatar and Egypt are in an “unannounced cold war” which has made himself and his colleagues victims of political strife.
“We’re just trying to keep our heads down and do our reporting and sometimes we get caught in the crossfire of things that are well beyond our control, and that seems to be what happened to Fahmy and his colleagues,” said Peter Klein, outgoing director of the UBC journalism school and director of the Global Reporting Centre.
One of the arrested colleagues and alleged co-conspirator is Peter Greste, an Australian journalist who has been released. Klein noted that the Australian government was very outspoken in their pleas to have Greste released, which he said involved direct appeals by the prime minister.
“It’s hard to know obviously what’s been happening behind the scenes [but] certainly from the outside it doesn’t look like the Canadian government has been terribly aggressive about this,” said Klein. “A Canadian citizen is being imprisoned, pretty much by all accounts, wrongly, you’d think there would be some strong diplomatic pressure [but] there doesn’t seem to be that.”
Egyptian journalist Baher Mohamed is also awaiting retrial with Fahmy.
If the retrial exonerates Fahmy, he will be coming back to Vancouver where he will begin as a journalist in residence. It was Klein who gathered the funds to be able to support Fahmy’s position at the university for a semester.
According to Klein, he applied for a fellowship at the Peter Wall Institute, a majority of which he put towards bringing Fahmy to UBC. Klein said he received overwhelming responses from the various places he reached out to for funding, including the Centre for Applied Ethics, The Liu Institute and different UBC faculties.
"I thought this was a very interesting opportunity for our Centre and for UBC to have a discussion about the ethical role of the media, of business and of governments," said David Silver, director of the centre for applied ethics, who was the lead sponsor for Fahmy's residency.
Fahmy said that this opportunity to be at UBC could not have come at a better time, as he is eager to share his experiences with the UBC students.
“Our trial basically summarizes the magnitude of how journalism and politics overlap nowadays and I want to reflect on that,” said Fahmy. “I have spent a lot of time in prisons with jihadists who were fighting Syria and Libya and … I’ve had sort of a privilege of being able to interview them without worrying about being killed while doing it. I want to share a lot of that with the students.”
Fahmy signed the contract for the position this past Wednesday, July 22.
When asked whether he believes that this hire will be a controversial decision, Klein said that “it’s controversial certainly in some circles, I mean Fahmy is suing Al Jazeera for a $100 million but I mean, most people know that … he didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not like he broke the law or he lied or he cheated, I mean, he was just doing journalism.”